BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch
Episode 19 But nobody needs to know that
BOFH
10 Oct 2025 | 96
BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "HR pawn to PFY's Window 4," the PFY murmurs as one of the greener members of HR wanders into Mission Control. Again. For the third time this week. "There's something wrong with our wireless," the HR junior says. "Really?" the PFY responds. "Is it the same thing that was wrong with it …
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Friday 22nd August 2025 09:12 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: The PFY still has a lot to learn
'I do wonder what the words "I've just got to nip up onto the roof to get something." suggest is in store for the boss'
I could (sub)frame an answer to your question .... but I'd much rather just observe the impact the Boss makes on arrival at his final destination.
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Saturday 23rd August 2025 01:19 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...
If the various user communities IT services internally for a business are supposed to be examples of "intelligent life" it is no wonder that the board thinks that they can be mostly replaced by Artificial Ignorance bots.
That's a pretty low bar, the typical corporate office drone.
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Saturday 23rd August 2025 01:22 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...
Testing? I remember when ISO9000 feedback from failed tests was supposed to result in changes to and creation of policies and procedures to prevent the issues from occurring again.
Don't see much mention of it any more; I guess it wasn't "profitable."
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Saturday 23rd August 2025 14:54 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...
There is obviously a production Matrix out there where they took all the results from the failed tests and fixed them. Unfortunately we are living in the sandbox Matrix that some junior dev is playing with
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Friday 22nd August 2025 11:42 GMT chivo243
My last onsite gig had 4 of us in a reappropriated hall closet, it was loong and narrow. Then is a reapportioned set of offices that became one office that turned out to be looong and narrow. And finally we were put in new purpose built office for us, it was a fishbowl with glass on 3 sides, near the entrance of the building. Spent more time waving to people than working. It sucked. Some of the data cabinets were not so lucky. One was in the basement under a drain pipe from the roof! That proved to be a bad plan not once but twice, and the second time everything in the rack and the rack itself needed to be replaced due to the PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.
It's a rain coat for the rack!
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Friday 22nd August 2025 15:18 GMT KittenHuffer
Elbow joints are a weak point in fluid transportation systems (pipes!) especially when the flow isn't uniform.
I've had water hammering take out plastic pipes at elbow joints before. Fortunately I was within hearing range, and the sound of the cistern valve closing didn't sound right, so I immediately investigated. The room concerned merely ended up wet, rather than flooding the entire floor.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 15:23 GMT The Oncoming Scorn
PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.
Back in the ancient days of El Reg.... there's a few recalls to an old tale of a unattended server room in a sub-basement & everything written off due to it being shin height in shit & piss, as the building designer never accounted for the strain on the elbow joint on turds & grey water, free falling down the straight pipe from up to 13 floors.
The other was a room full of shiny new telecoms kit that had to be written off as the mainline sewer pipe ran parallel to the other side of a wall, that burst through after heavy rainfall.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 18:14 GMT dmesg
Re: PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.
At one job our desks, and several racks of dev equipment, were directly under a restroom that lacked a floor drain. You know how toilets sometimes get to running water, and running water, and running water? There were several inches of water on the restroom floor, and raincoats, umbrellas, and trash bags valiantly keeping the ceiling rain off the equipment, with varying degrees of success.
Fortunately no machines were seriously damaged. The restroom acquired a drain within a few days.
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Monday 25th August 2025 14:34 GMT TeeCee
Re: PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.
Hey! Sometimes having kit under a leak is a good thing.
I once worked in an antiquated building that had faux wood boxing under the windows, containing the airco units. Only the original, antique units would fit, they were prone to failure and leaks, and there was a queue for reconditioned ones.
One day I was greeted by a soggy carpet at my desk and the local environment being rather too warm. I trotted off to facilities and was told they'd "put it on the list". Ho hum.
Struck by inspiration, I went down a floor and looked through an internal window into an area that was off limits. I then went back to facilities.
"Look, we told you
to fuck offwe'd put it on the list."."Just thought you'd like to know what's underneath my desk on the floor below.".
"What's that?".
"The main comms rack for the building. You can clearly see the water dripping onto it through the ceiling.".
The facilities manager left the room at about Warp 7 and my faied airco unit was swapped out in record time.
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Tuesday 26th August 2025 16:11 GMT Sparkypatrick
Re: PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.
Also a previous job, the top floor tenant installed (without permission) an additional toilet. Directly above the electrical riser. Took out all power to the building for nearly a week, when the inevitable happened. Moved our server room to a co-lo not long after.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 10:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
This:
still connected to the meeting room wireless at the other end of the building
The reverse was common as the meeting room is in one half of the building, the offices in the other and they're separated by a fire break staircase, i.e. concrete with lots of reinforcement.
Lots of complaints that the WiFi was rubbish, they couldn't join Teams meetings, etc. despite repeatedly being told to make sure they'd connected to the WAP that says MeetingRoom. The message got through eventually, I'd love to install a full mesh system but can't justify the cost.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 11:29 GMT CountCadaver
Re: This:
And fritzbox let's you extend the mesh via WiFi or ethernet, which allows me to resolve the issue of great WiFi outside the garage, terrible WiFi within it (due to all the metal bits and bobs) by running an ethernet cord out to the secondhand fritzbox (eBay) and a little bit of icon clicking and pushing 2 physical buttons et voilà
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Friday 22nd August 2025 18:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This:
Yes, if I can pull this off at home with my antiquated and atrophied IT skills, it should be easy for an actual pro to do.
Although to be fair, some client devices are absolute shit at figuring out they can connect to the 5 GHz AP in the same room, and stubbornly hang on to the 2.4 GHz signal that just barely peeks above the noise floor.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 11:10 GMT ben_s
Any half decent IT department would get an alert if they couldn't ping an AP, and they would have a look at the switch to see that an interface was disconnected, then go and take a look.
They'd then notice a pattern, take a look at the records to see who was connected to any nearby APs at the time, and because you'd have to do it when the office was quiet, fairly soon work out who it was disconnecting them.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 11:55 GMT Caver_Dave
My partner has similar issues with any joke that is not 100% logical and correct.
The suspension of belief for a second or two, being the main proponent of getting a joke.
When the response to almost every joke is a quizzical look and "But ..."
(a) you stop telling jokes
(b) you tell even worse "Dad jokes"
I've gone for the later :-)
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Friday 22nd August 2025 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
You think we don't have a vm on that network that will easily accept additional network interfaces, created with the access point's mac address and ip addresses to fool the monitoring system? Some of us weren't born yesterday.
rIf you really want to confuse people, you can use a $250 spool of fiber and make their computer, which is 50m from the network closet, appear to be 25km farther away. If you can't get your hands on a spool of fiber, but have a box of patch cables and a spare 48 port switch, you can connect the user to port 1 and the upstream switch to port 48, and then put ports 1-2 in vlan 1, 3-4 in vlan 2. 5-6 in vlan 3, etc, and cable ports 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, etc, making his computer 25 hops away from the actual network.
anon for legal reasons.
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Monday 25th August 2025 10:19 GMT Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward
You think we don't have a vm on that network that will easily accept additional network interfaces, created with the access point's mac address and ip addresses to fool the monitoring system? Some of us weren't born yesterday.
rIf you really want to confuse people, you can use a $250 spool of fiber and make their computer, which is 50m from the network closet, appear to be 25km farther away. If you can't get your hands on a spool of fiber, but have a box of patch cables and a spare 48 port switch, you can connect the user to port 1 and the upstream switch to port 48, and then put ports 1-2 in vlan 1, 3-4 in vlan 2. 5-6 in vlan 3, etc, and cable ports 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, etc, making his computer 25 hops away from the actual network.
anon for legal reasons.
So gonna steal this idea, muhuhahaha.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 15:25 GMT doublelayer
You'll note that the scheme they suggested was the hypothetical thing you would do, not what actually happened. And, if someone did try it on them, they could still succeed. When the first AP went down due to a cable disconnect, the BOFH would do one of the following:
1. Come check it, but if the schemer was smart and left the cable mostly connected, the BOFH could assume that something else had caused the disconnect and just replace it. The user sees that disconnecting it gets immediate attention and known not to do that next time. They could still do the shielding idea though.
2. Not come check it because it's the HR department and they don't deserve immediate attention, in which case this investigation would happen only in retrospect.
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Friday 22nd August 2025 19:41 GMT DS999
Re: Hardly a PFY any more?
Maybe there are "unaired" episodes where the BOFH sees the PFY as getting too good at his job and becomes a threat, and ends up getting tricked by something like a long complained about but repeatedly found to be fine floor tile in front of an open window?
When he gets a new PFY who isn't wise to all the BOFH tricks, then he can save one to use when the new PFY gets too smart for his own good.
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Monday 25th August 2025 20:35 GMT DS999
Re: Hardly a PFY any more?
So its like an MLM scheme, where the former PFY now BOFH gives a cut of whatever he can scam out of his new place to the BOFH who trained him? And he'll train another PFY who will someday become a BOFH and give a cut to him, part of which will be passed up the chain.
Pretty soon Simon would be able to buy his company and fire whoever he wanted. Though he probably has more fun getting them to step down empty elevator shafts or fall out full height windows.
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Tuesday 9th September 2025 10:55 GMT Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?
Re: Hardly a PFY any more?
Maybe there are "unaired" episodes where the BOFH sees the PFY as getting too good at his job and becomes a threat, and ends up getting tricked by something like a long complained about but repeatedly found to be fine floor tile in front of an open window?
I'm pretty sure (but it's been a very, very long time) that in one of the very old episodes (as in before Simon was getting published on El Reg) that at least one PFY who was getting a little too ambitious has been, ahem, dealt with
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Friday 22nd August 2025 22:39 GMT Blackjack
I don't think the insurance will cover the laptop falling from the roof, however you may be able to get a new one by claiming that one can't upgrade to windows 11. Then nick the old one for personal use while claiming it a Windows update borked it. Then just delay until the new laptop arrives. Then of course they can't get the old laptop back, it cannot run Windows 11!