BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns There are whispers that HR wants to move down a floor. The Beancounters heard those whispers and started their own whisper chain about wanting to move up a floor. The Beancounters are practically fizzing at the prospect of an elevated view, while the HR crew is effervescent over the idea …
A few years later, but still pre-internet, that line was very handy for messaging a friend.
I could dial in to work, start a PSS session to JANET (Joint Academic Network), connect to the NUNET (Northumbrian Universities Network) access point in Durham from which I could get on to the MicroVax in the lab in Newcastle where he worked (I'd been given a login). I could then message him! I hate to think what the total cost was.
One of our unofficial tasks at the Higher Education Establishment where I studied was to get on to JANET and then try to get all the way around the world to post something on a local bulletin board. I only got as far as Turkey as I frankly, had better things to do, but some people claimed to have reached the Far East (for which they provided a list of steps) or Australia (which I think was BS).
A decade later, the Intercontinental hotel on Park Lane had an international 64k leased line back to the states that went down... I'm not saying the outage was expensive, but I believe the quarterly rental was 6 figures
Luckily it was just.a blown fuse as it was pretty unique in the West End at the time
ISTR the company I worked for in the early 1980's had a satellite link to back up their UK mainframe to their HQ in the USA (I didn't work for the IT department but my job involved a lot of dealings with them). I also recall that our department secretary got a PC to replace her typewriter just as I left the company. In my next job I had my own desktop PC (woohoo!)
yea - The team leader informs us that each person has their own specialty, though it looks like the skills of bum scratching and asking stupid questions may be over-represented.
that one hit home, memories of actually watching some monkeys in shirt n tie trying to re arrange an office, and 'accidently' starting a broadcast storm :o)
oh what fun LOL
We had that happen all too recently at [RedactedCo]- the HVAC contractor noticed a couple cables sitting loose, so they plugged them into a switch and caused a network loop, taking down the lighting controls for the entire building with it.
The situation got fixed via skill use of some snips to remove the plugs off the cables after they were unplugged...
Clearly someone who has been there...
Firefox versions that were from 3.x era and old versions of Sun [sic] java for jws support (all under RHEL7) takes some ingenuity all that just to support and manage hardware that would otherwise embarrass the other less senior occupants of the e-waste skip.
Sigh... I've just run into this, again, for some old Brocade FibreChannel switches we still use. And for a 20 year old application written in house using Oracle Forms 6 running on Solaris 5.9 on a V120 that's 20 years old. Sigh... luckily I can just quietly archive that system and application and it's data. It will never ride again.
I came to say " a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors." have been plaguing IT for a loooong time. We kept an old lappy with a serial port (how antiquated), and running XP. I think it was a toshiba.
The Toshiba laptop I kep for a looooooong time (a dinosaur... Pentium with MMX with Windows 95) was kept for it's SCSI PCMCI card and the all important X.25/V.24/X.21/V35/V.36 box attached to it that could be used both as a protocol analyzer for those all important ( at that time ) Telecom protocols and a traffic generator for them too.
It stayed around me for decades ( and nowadays it's probably rotting in a crate forgotten in a recess of the office ) because I was the only one able to make sense of what those pesky protocols were doing.
The Toshibas from that time were indestructible.
My damn 2021-vintage HP printer STILL serves its web interface in HTTP only. It claims to take a certificate that will let it enable the HTTPS server, but I've seen no evidence of any truth to that claim.
Plus, even if I could give it a self-signed certificate, then I'd have the adventure of trying to convince my browser to trust that certificate.
Way back in the days of Novell Netware 3/4 and IPX, one of my customers had a tendency to swap his kit around. Especially printers. Which were connected to Netgear printer servers that had a fixed printer server name. And he just couldn't figure out why the printers only printed garbage after the move. I tried to explain to him any number of times that the Epson LX800 that printed invoices on the triple-copy chain form in stores did not use the same printer language as the HP Laserjet III on the secretary's desk, and that therefore it was vital that the right printer be connected to the printer server configured for it, but he never got it. And moving printer servers along with the printers was also not an option more often than not, because they had two network segments (hanging off two Ethernet cards in the server) with two different IPX network addresses, so a printer server from the ground floor wouldn't work at all on the first floor and vice versa.
Unfortunately the building had no lift shafts or a basement...
Back in the early part of this century, I landed a short term gig at a insurance office that created lots of drama, out their crisis of a water tank dumping water on the offices of the floor beneath it.
Managers in their wisdom played musical printers to get their print jobs working, naturally they didn't print as the printers were all on different subnets.
Much fun was had by me punching in new IP settings, checking the patching closet (Bonus points for my contact at the bridge, asking if I was on a landline or cellphone, I stated Orange, he was very surprised as nobody who had ever been on site had had connectivity in the patching closet).
Think I was there for about 7 days & didn't end up doing what I was supposed to be doing in the first place....
I worked in a government office building housing about 800 users & computers , that were constantly swapping rooms with each other ( not the users and computers , just the users for the syntacticly pedantic) .
Great for overtime but a pointless waste of taxpayers money.
Buttloads of non voip phones having to be reprogrammed via an old siemens exchange command line interface was one of the joys not mentioned in the BOFH story
...the in joke was that they moved just so the management has a window seat on the sunnyside of the building.
Mouldy food, missing hardware, hundreds of power bricks, single shoes and even a pair of knickers.
Seen it all.
The day we moved to IP telephony was a joy.
One time I ended up getting "volunteered" for the task of moving a lab / workshop space from one side of the building to the other. It had started life as the only non-office workspace in the entire building and over the years had been used by multiple different teams, all of whom hadn't taken their shit with them after getting allocated their own spaces elsewhere. As a result it was decided to ruthlessly clear out the contents rather than just move everything - I recall about 75% of the contents of the lab went in the skip outside.
The treasures in the cupboards included about 100 x 50ml glass vials of rather strong formaldehyde in a cardboard box, another large box full of scarily swollen lithium batteries and a folder of A4 papers that mostly consisted of former managers and engineers photoshopped onto various movie posters.
Stray knickers *could* be due to an extra pair hiding in a pant leg after laundry.l, but it does remind me of a case at $dayjob.
Production crew was all excited one day due to the discovery of an enticing pair of ladies undergarments somewhere on the floor.
Coworker #1: "Well, I guess there's only one thing to do."
Coworker #2: "What's that?"
Coworker #1: "Remember Cinderella?"
has started learning when he figures out the idiots wont be needing a return ticket for a trip to the basement... that was the coffee moment.
But its friday the 13th, and unlucky for some. as the boss sticks his head around the office door and says "Ah Boris, Glad I've caught you" and sees that a luckless operator is 'helping' me with the dodgy catch on the office window "Drop by my office when you've finished"
The look of hope on the operators face when the boss appeared was replaced by a look of utter despair when the boss shut the door and disappeared.
"Now lets see about teaching you to check the work at least once in your 8 hr shift.." as I pitched him feet first out of the window and towards the waiting woodchipper.
However the PFY installed a 2" thick transparent acrylic sheet over the woodchipper that diverted said operator through the HR managers open window and into a chair in front of his desk.
The HR manager did later comment about making people use the door to his office install of randomly throwing them through the window when they fooked up.
That doesn't have to be deliberate. HVAC systems are perfectly capable of doing that all on their own. Two adjacent labs in a building far too new to get any slack for this were consistently about 10 degrees apart in temperature, up and down five from normal room temperature. Our theory was that the temperature sensors were recorded as in the opposite rooms, but it could have been an even simpler problem. Either way, it never changed no matter how many people commented about it.
Or the nearly-new system at my place of work (had the entire HVAC replaced a couple of years ago) where a couple of weeks back I had to pop on to the roof in order to physically switch the heat exchangers off at their Big Red Switches because a: there is no way on the BMS interface to do that, b: there is no way on the control panels in the plant rooms to do that and c: despite the system calling for "cool", the blasted things were stuck on "heat" on the hottest day in May. Turned out that they had been mis-wired (in a logic sense on the controllers rather than an actual physical mis-wiring) since day one, but since they had only been commissioned just before Christmas and no substantial cooling had been necessary since then, no-one had noticed; the BMS said "cooling" even though when I checked the pipes they were hot.
And don't get me started on the "triple redundant" temperature sensors in one very large room, where two separate HVAC units each supply air to half the room and there's also the separate underfloor heating, where none of the dozen or so sensors can agree what the actual temperature is (even with quite wide "deadbands" set) meaning that at times one HVAC can be heating while the other cools and the UFH doesn't run even when both HVACs are flat out, trying to raise the temperature above "should have worn my coat".
M.
I once worked at a place that had a temperature differential. Lucky me had an office that also could have been used to store beef sides.
The ironic, not ironic thing? It was a company that did HVAC engineering and they were the engineers for the TI that prepared the space for our move-in.
When he got the boss to agree to hiring someone to do the moves he should have suggested a vendor, which just happened to be one the BOFH owned and he could sub out the work to people who were at least mildly competent. Or he and the PFY could have avoided all the problems from incompetent/overeager contractors and done the work themselves over the weekend while getting paid a month's worth of salary at the inflated rates his company was charging!
A month? You've clearly never been in this line of work. Way back when I was practically a sprog I used to do the grunt work for one of these companies. They paid us grunts enough from three (nominal) shifts, usually totalling about 6-8 hours, on a Friday evening and Saturday morning, that it paid somewhat better than full-time junior-ish sysadmin work. IIRC was ~£500 for the three 'shifts'. We can reasonably assume they were charging the clients double that.
I would guess that at equivalent rates today, plus mark-up, the BOFH would have cleared more like a year's pay for a weekend's work. Or rather, not a weekend's work, but as long as it took to change the floor-button labels in the lift, and the signs on the office doors...
Even better and easier on one of the places I frequent. You tap you badge on the lift panel in the foyer and it then displays only the floors you are allowed[*] to access on the, in my case only floor 7. It'd be quite simple to "adjust" the lift control computer to show 7 and drop me of at 6 or 8. Not sure it would be all that obvious if the floor was laid out identically :-)
* "allowed" as in that's where the lift goes. The stairs have no "security" other than you can only get to the floor foyers before needing to badge in again.
> Not sure it would be all that obvious if the floor was laid out identically
There’s a government building that has identical floor layouts. Even the loos are identical, needing a double check on the door. Finding your way out can be a real challenge, we ended up in the basement bomb shelter!
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