Posts by technos

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Re: April Fools!

By the time he got ballsy enough to take another try at it (which wasn't for months) the numbers were indeed better.

April Fools!

Back in the early naughties we had a sales veep looking to cut some people during a bad quarter. So he looks over the March prelim sales report and writes an email to the two lowest ranked people. "Due to your insufficient blah-blah-blah, performance improvement plan, blah-blah-blah."

Five minutes later he's in the IT office, freaking out and asking us how he can delete mail he's sent. Seems he sent the email not just to his two under performers, but to every one in the sales group. Oh, joy. While we could technically do it, Legal would eat us alive. They even complained when we deleted spam, insisting we silo it away instead.

My boss waves him to an empty cube, tells him to log into webmail, then types up a second email on his behalf:

>Subject: April Fools!

>Body: Our March numbers aren't even out yet! And don't worry, from what I've seen of things, you're all doing a fantastic job.

He clicked send and then told the Veep to go back down to Sales, remind them to look at their inbox again, and announce that the first round was on him after work.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

When this happened to me it was a mere six months. I'd done a few things for them over the years and I'd always been able to help previously, so someone figured I was holding out on them as some kind of extortion.

Not even a full day passed between the call asking if I still had a copy and the lawyers sending me a nasty-gram via FedEx. I'd have been afraid, except the very same lawyers had been the ones to instruct me to delete the source code on the way out the door. New policy, they said, before handing me a form and asking me to sign. I'd even been smart enough to make a copy of it, which I faxed over to refresh their memories.

I still wasn't gonna be a complete dick about it, even if they were willing to be, so I waited about a week for their situation to sink in and emailed a friend. "Y'know, it just occurred to me that, when we did the last beta, that we included the source tree on the CDs we sent the telecommuters. Some of those dudes are serious hoarders, so I bet one of them still has it."

A copy turned up in someone's home-office in Taiwan.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

You were warned to shut things down!

Had a guy in our building from another business unit running three unpatched Windows 2000 boxes.

IT had been going back and forth with the guy and his entire chain of command for months. He claimed it was too important to have any downtime, his managers believed him, yadda, yadda. Finally, at about month six, we get a clear policy edict from someone important enough everyone had to listen; He is to patch or he is to be unplugged from the network.

So that's what the guy did. He installed the current service pack and then reported that he had patched. But he didn't reboot. We could even see the damned dialogs through the glass wall of his office.

On one hand, my boss was pissed. On the other, well, not his circus, not his monkey. He'd just go through the motions again and, in couple months, the guy would have a second edict to actually complete the patch or be cut off from the network.

Enter Tim. Tim took the dialog personally, like the guy was bragging he'd outsmarted us, and he would not let that stand. He spent days brainstorming how he could get into that office and click "Reboot" without being caught by the badge readers or the cameras. He thought about bribing janitorial staff, about going over the false ceiling, about manufacturing a VCR failure and popping the door, etc.

And then a memo goes around. Facilities is going to be checking lighting ballasts over the weekend, as they've had a few fail and they want to get ahead of things. Make sure to shut everything down when you leave, be aware you might not have lighting if you're working overtime, etc.

This gives Tim the perfect idea. He wanders over to facilities, says he saw the memo, and asks the manager if, since he's going to be shutting off breakers anyway, could he tag along and make sure all of them were labelled properly? That sure would make things a lot easier for both of them the next time they had to do a cubicle move or confiscate a space heater.

It only took ten minutes of Tim's Saturday for the UPS keeping those Win2K boxes on to give up the ghost and for Tim to head home a winner.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Just a quick manicure.

Couldn't, the two settings had a pin in common.

Besides, what's the point of screwing with someone if they don't know they're being screwed with? :)

Just a quick manicure.

We had a guy that solved a desktop stability problem with nail trimmers.

See, the users in that department were slightly technical, and had figured out they could overclock the Pentium 100's they'd been issued by changing a jumper. Sure, their build times dropped, but the machines became a little flaky. You'd think that folks making unauthorized modifications to company hardware might keep it quiet, but not these folks. They openly admitted to overclocking and *whined* about their applications crashing.

On about the third or fourth trip over there where he found a machine behaving badly because they'd changed the clock speed, he noticed a pair of nail clippers on a desk across the way and was inspired.

Snip! Off came one of the pins in the jumper block, and with it, the ability for the motherboard to be clocked to 120mhz.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: Service != Server

Naw.. I wasn't gonna blow perfectly good blackmail material when there were plenty of other ways to put pressure on him.

Like roll it into my next one, with a late fee, send it to Accounting, and let them yell at him for not doing his paperwork.

Ended up sitting on it for over a year and then used it to impress upon him the importance of dealing with the three employees running Gnutella and hosing the network, telling him that if I got one more baloney complaint that 'the network is slow' I'd bring pictures of the unplugged equipment and share them with his CEO as a funny story.

Service != Server

I once offhandedly mentioned to a user that his label printer problem was because the service it relied on had frozen so I restarted it.

What he apparently heard was "I restarted the server", because the next time he had trouble with his label printer, he walked into the closet they called a server room and pulled a bunch of power cables.

Two machines and a switch didn't come back up. Two of them hadn't been plugged back in correctly, one dropped to single-user when it found a dirty filesystem.

Worst part of the story is that, after dropping my date-night plans and bailing him out of an emergency of his own making, he told everyone the issue was a 'power blip' and stalled on approving my invoice. He wanted a significant discount because, and I quote, "The problem only happened because of your poor communication skills.".

I emailed back: "How's this for clear communication? You can either authorize the invoice and forward it to accounting, or I will be informing the company leadership what caused the 'power blip' and having them authorize it.". There was some further whining about how it was going to come out of his budget and that I should 'have a heart' but I did get paid.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Sometimes the other person is yourself.

Almost as good.

She called the company's lawyer and asked what his reaction would be to finding out HR was sending five figure demand letters to former employees without his okay.

The lawyer said something like "Well, I'd probably go over and chew them new assholes, why?" followed shortly thereafter by a string of expletives once he caught on that it wasn't a hypothetical question and that he was going to have to waste his morning dealing with them.

Sometimes the other person is yourself.

I once had a coworker get entered into the HR database twice, once with a misspelled first name.

Her first paycheck arrived written out to the misspelled name, so she called HR, who apologized and cut her a new one on the spot.

The next month she got two paychecks, one in each name. HR apologized again and told her to shred the one issued in error.

At the end of her fourth month she got no paycheck at all. HR hadn't been sure which entry was wrong, so they'd deactivated them both. More apologies.

Month five was the first time she got paid correctly.

She thought it was all behind her until in January she was presented two tax statements, one in each name, and both for her entire salary. Despite HR 'straightening things out' the IRS still audited her.

And the worst bit? A year after leaving she gets a letter saying that, because of the second HR listing, the company had miscalculated her bonuses the entire time she'd been there and they'd like very much if she'd cut them a check for $37,000 sometime in the next seven business days.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Re: A simple solution

>Just disconnect the big red button.

I used to work in a room with a Big Red Button.. The room had housed a 70's IBM originally, and when it was replaced by a rack of Suns it was re-wired to shut them down in an orderly manner.

By the time I was in the space the computers had been moved across the building. Only the Big Red Button remained. Myself (and a few of my colleagues) took to occasionally punching it when we wandered past. What we didn't know was that every time we did a monitoring server in the new server room saw an event and alerted an admin that a dozen servers were about to be powered down.

The admin quickly realized that the alerts were associated with servers that no longer existed and reconfigured things so they weren't being paged, but still kept them logged to figure out where they were coming from.Took him a month, as he reviewed the monitoring software config, tracked the message source to an unlabelled metal box in a closet, and then toned the wiring out to our Big Red Button.

Happily, he didn't make us remove it. He did, however, stand there and watch as one of our engineers opened it up and physically cut the wiring.

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Re: The Security Was Possibly Via a Screwdriver

>Do NOT get caught by BTP with one, or they'll ask pointy questions

When I was a consultant I kept a kit in my car for all those times the failing equipment was behind a locked door and no one on site could produce a key. Lock picks, security bits, various 'universal' keys, tools for disassembling security hinges, etc.

Aaand then I got pulled over for speeding and the cop saw the bright orange Pelican with a tongue-in-cheek 'Burglary Tools' stenciled on it in my back seat.

Whew, boy. Five minutes of explaining, twenty minutes of sitting while he made sure I had absolutely no warrants, another five minutes of re-explaining, and then he wanted me to run him through what I had in there because he was interested.

Got out of the speeding ticket at least, but I painted over the stencil and renamed it the 'Lock-out Kit'.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

The day *after* the funeral

.. a woman walked in, introduced herself as Joe's widow, and said someone at the funeral told her we were having trouble with his passwords.

I made a call, and yeah, we were. Joe had the Supervisor PIN for some of the CNC machines, and no one else knew it.

So I walked her down to the plant where the machines were. She looked at the keypad for a second and said "Try 9635. It's his bank account PIN." Nope. "Try 9354. That's the code to get into the garage."

Success!

As I was leading her back to the office she off the cuff said "If you need into his computer, it's either Friday96 or Becca98. Those are our cats." Before reimaging Joe's machine for reuse, I checked. His password was indeed Friday96.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

The company wasn't that bad on the regular. He got his first set of credentials quick enough, within a couple of days.

But when he completed his work over three months early through automation and documentation, he got assigned to an IT related project.

IT didn't want him to make them look bad, so they did their best to keep him away. Making the outside lawyers review his contract. Four weeks for a (second, unneeded) background check. A drug test that kept getting 'lost' in the mail. A personnel review assigned to someone on maternity leave.

He didn't care, he was being paid.

It's time to kill the dragon!

Once had a coworker get stuck between Ops and IT, with each group blaming the other for the lack of login credentials. His boss told him to 'go browse the internet or play a game or something'.

So for the last three months of his six-month contract he played Everquest, open 'til close, and with no definable work being demanded of him for the monthly progress reports, his boss graded him on how well his MMO was going.

HR even offered him a contract extension based on him meeting the self-imposed metrics of "getting to level 50 on my Wizard" and "killing Nagafen".

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Careful with that axe, Eugene!

I went out to a restaurant to reboot a router, only to find it was behind a thick wooden door that no one had the key to.

Not a big deal, the hinges were facing outwards.

On my way out the door to my truck for a hammer and punch, I mentioned the locked door to a bartender and told him I'd be back. I didn't end up needing them, because by the time I made it back the he had opened the door for me.

With a fire axe. And boy, did he look happy with himself.

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

I tried this on with my parents.

My brother had set up a PC and webcam connected to the living room TV so they could Skype their relatives. I hadn't seen it, but since I was the one visiting, I got charged with fixing it when it suddenly didn't work.

My brother had put the PC in a bad place. Folks were always bumping it on the way into the hall, knocking cables out. There were four cables out; Ethernet, audio, microphone, and finally power. Thanks to wifi and internal sound, none of the cables mattered until power.

As I plugged them back in I shouted for Mom.

"You two been watching porn on this? You tripped the filter."

My mother, with a straight face, yelled into the kitchen for my father.

"Honey? There's a porn filter on the TV."

She then turned back to me. "Is it okay if we watch it in the bedroom?"

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

I swear I've heard this story before with a flooded parking garage as a bonus.

There was talk around the office that one of our customers would be returning their Cray-2 instead of buying it, which meant we'd have to test it to resell for the most money.

Ron was against testing. He didn't trust that fancy chlorofluronated crap Cray used, and he didn't like 'water' cooling in general.

"Last time I worked on something like this I had to replace my Mustang!"

Ron claimed to have worked at a company with a Univac, and the thing kept getting hot. One of the 'engineers', who had worked on nuclear subs in the past, thought it was air bubbles in the cooling system. "Starvation caused by insufficient reserve volume", he said.

Mister Bull Nuke decided they would 'burp' the cooling system by attaching a couple of valves and hoses. One to vent the air and steam from the hot side into a city drain in the garage, another to add water on the cold side from a tap.

Ron continued on. "There isn't any real reserve volume in a Sperry-Univac, and it wasn't starvation, it was cavitation."

By the time the 'engineer' gave up, they had eight inches of water in the small underground garage and his Mustang was a total loss.

Protip: If Joe Public reports that your kit is broken, maybe check that it is actually broken

Three broken laptops.

I installed fifteen laptops into a training room. Easy peasy, they'd already had an electrician do the ethernet and power runs. All I needed to do was plug them in and make sure they booted.

Except that on the first day they used the room, three laptops were dead. They'd come to life for a moment with a press of the power button, but that was it.

Went back in, flipped on the lights, and sat down at the first laptop. Hmm, works fine, but the battery is dead. Same for the other two. So that's what I reported.

A week passes and I get called again. The same three laptops are dead, and they're out out of patience with me. I come down immediately, and what do I find? They power on.

"We must've been doing something wrong, I'm sorry."

As I'm leaving the room, the lights go back out so that the trainer can use the projector and I hear it.

"<BEEEP> <beep> <beep>". The telltale plug me in now, I'm dying this particular line of laptops had.

Had the trainer leave half the lights on for training and demanded the electrician come back in the next morning to fix his fuck-up.

Electrician swore he wasn't at fault and charged a huge call out fee. When I went to show management the issue.. Wouldn't you know it? The light switch no longer cut power to the laptops.

Despite the trainer and several of the students backing me up, I had to replace them.

But I charged them for the new hardware, so it was all good.

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: African customs

During Nixon's detente with the Soviet-bloc some engineers from my grandfather's company went to Russia as part of a State Department approved program.

Upon arrival in Moscow one of the engineer's checked bags was mysteriously pilfered from. Two new suits and an electric razor were missing. He asks one of the Russian guides if there's somewhere he can recommend to buy some new ones. The guide laughs and says not to worry, he'll have them found.

After a quick meal, the engineer arrives at the hotel to find a package on his bed. It contained the suits, freshly pressed and.. A brand-new East German razor?

That was the point he realized the State Department's warning that the KGB would be watching them was probably true, and that some airport or customs employee was most certainly in deep shit.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

You want how many leases?

Worked for a place that leased equipment. Big companies, big checks every month.

The AR department had a woman who's job it was to keep up on late customers, and she used a reasonably clever Excel spreadsheet to do it. With probably 2000 active leases it wasn't unmanageable, the spreadsheet floating right around 25,000 rows by the end of any given fiscal year.

The problem was a certain retail corporation. They didn't want one big lease, no. They wanted one lease per location, per equipment type, so ~1,200 small leases with ~1,200 small checks.

Six months later she called IT freaking out how Excel was broken and wouldn't let her add data! Seems that Retail Corporation sent lots of late payments, which required extra rows to document, and she'd hit the magic number of 65,536.

Retail Corporation got their own spreadsheet, she squeaked out the year at 62,000 rows, and the whole thing was replaced by a VB application with a real database not long after.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

I didn't even have to do it myself.

I myself once had a bad router behind a deadbolted, heavy duty door so I went out to my truck to grab my tool box. The door swung out, and this wasn't my first rodeo using a hammer and chisel on hinges, so not a big deal.

In the ten minutes I was gone an angry employee had found himself a fire axe and done the door in for me.

He looked proud, and he was still holding the axe, so I just nodded and got to work swapping the router.

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: Sounds like the muppets who tried to test a book's bullet-stopping capabilities...

I've seen .22LR (from a cheap rifle, at distance) stopped by a copy of Larry Wall's 'Programming Perl'.

The O'Reilly Sendmail book is longer, so...

Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

After the dot-com crashes I took a job at a transportation company on graveyard shift and was usually the only soul in the building for a good portion of the night. Some nights I could swear I heard an old-fashioned telephone ringing, but it was so muffled and indistinct I could never pinpoint it in time to answer it.

So what's a guy to do? Wardial every number we'd been assigned until I found the right one, and then dial that over and over until I found the phone itself. I found a lot of phones in weird places; Two in closets, one under a ladies room sink, one behind an electrical panel in a storage building, etc, but finding the one I wanted was a bit harder. Even armed with the number I could only ever get close; It just seemed to echo throughout our offices.

I had to break out the big guns, a linesman's handset and a wire tracer.

Turns out that when they'd converted a portion of a disused repair shop into more offices in the 1970's the workmen managed to cover an operational telephone in drywall, leaving it to ring into a void created by the fake walls and drop ceiling.

The best part? Just feet away, hanging on the wall of the break room was an enlarged black and white photograph of the old repair shop. The phone was clearly visible and blown up to nearly half real-world size.

I only ever used my knowledge for evil, of course. If I was stuck late I'd take over a table next to the coffee maker with my reports and spend the last half hour or so annoying my coworkers by calling it and watching them scramble. If someone asked me if I knew what phone it was I'd point at the photograph.

"Maybe it's that one."

700,000 Muslim Match dating site private messages leaked online

Sausage festival...

I've had a look through the comments, and the biggest take away I got was that there weren't enough women on the site, if there were any actual women at all.

Over half the messages were guys begging (actual begging) for a message back or complaining that the site must not be working or he'd surely have received one back, and nearly all of the rest were the guys sending the same overly formal come-on over and over.

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

Re: Never received it....

[snip]However the "read-receipt" thing doesn't exist at my work, not only do all the clients have it turned off, but the mail server strips the header from the emails.[/snip]

Send email as HTML, include a 1x1 white pixel on an external server you control. That's what I do, at least.

TV gesture patent bombshell: El Reg punts tech into public domain

Re: Some more gestures

-- Index finger in nostril - Discovery channel.

That sounds great. I was afraid I'd have to drink my own piss. Will my thumb work?

Surprise! Republican bill adds politics to science funding

Re: Just imagine...

It could be argued that the President has the authority to renogitiate or withdraw from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo without Senate oversight, and Mexico never recognized the old Republic of Texas, after all.

CIA demands UK halts interrogation tactics

What, couldn't schedule one ahead of time?

By god, I've been waiting seven hours for a suitable April Fools to appear.

The Register has disappointed me before, when they lost any semblance of journalistic principles, but this takes the cake!

Three questions for the Jesus SDK

Ahem

-- If all you dumb ass linux developers had even a little clue about developing apps that understand the fundamentals of human user interface then the mobile phone market wouldn't be in the code mess it's in now and Apple might not have entered the market.

If I'm not mistaken, you're an American. And in the North American market, Windows Mobile is the party to blame for horrid smartphone usability. Not Linux, not even mighty Symbian.

After all, it is almost entirely the WinCE market share being eaten by the iPhone, right?

Smut peddlers and spammers invade Google Groups

You assume they're reputable

--- Is that it costs virtually nothing to spam 4 gazillion people, so even if they only sell a palet load of viagra - then its worth it.

Oh come on now. Do you honestly believe that any company that spams you is legitimate? They're not even selling a single Viagra pill, let alone a pallet. They're hoping some moron will give them their credit card details, nothing more.

Paris isn't even that dumb.

Ofcom to clamp down on 'unfair' charges

Rude names? Oh my.

-- Apparenty my credit card company and my bank also have a lot of customers with very rude online names not dissimilar to theirs, I discovered. In fact they seemed to have customers with similar names for every rude word I could think of, no matter how it was composed.

Those user accounts are the ones administrators use for internal testing. Who hates an online bill payment system more than the ones that designed and implemented it, after all?

Hollywood writers abandon Hollywood for web

'Fast food nation' Bah.

'The Jungle' written by Upton Sinclair.

Originally serialized by a Socialist paper in Chicago, it was the reason anything was done at all. After it had been published as a book, Sinclair sent Roosevelt a copy and through repeatedly prodding at him got a look taken at the meat industry. Sinclair had hoped he would look into the 'wage slave' conditions of the packing plants, but in the end all they did was regulate the cleanliness of the industry.