Posts by nick turner

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Earlier in my career I used to do a lot of DR planning work for companies. The usual answer to the question "what would we do if a meteor hit the office" type question would be to claim the insurance and retire to a nice tropical island.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

That company was so messed up. The CEO used to be one of the big players in the late 80's rave scene, running big illegal parties with his friends, then went on to work for Kiss FM I believe before being parachuted in as CEO for the music tech startup. He was a complete headcase. I was in the sole office toilet one day and noticed a loose tile and being a nosy bugger I decided to see what was in there and found burned foil and a wrapped quantity of the Brown stuff hidden in there. We all knew the guy was a user so I took the evidence to my CTO who then said he would take it up with the CEO. Suffice to say the CTO did not show up in the office again and went on to much bigger and better things. Whereas the startup completely tanked just over a year later.

That was the same company that sent me to Canada to build some servers in Toronto, but didn't bother to get me a return ticket and told me there was no set date to travel home, causing issues both with my future ex wife and US customs when they sent me from Toronto to the HQ of BestBuy in the US with another 1 way ticket! Although that wasn't the worst part of the trip, that would have been the one evening off we got out of 4 weeks work and I was forced to endure an intimate Coldplay concert at a bar!

Back in the late 90s when I was starting my career as a Desktop support dogsbody we were running out of storage on the network so I was tasked with doing an analysis of what was being stored and freeing up some space.

We discovered a small number of users were using the majority of the server. Unsurprisingly these were mostly video files and we suspected they were not work related at all. One user in particular was particularly bad so we opened up some sample videos to confirm the content.

As dictated by the Law of Murphy a company senior manager walked into the IT office just as the video fired up displaying a rather fetching couple participating in a gonzo style grumble scene. He was a little perturbed so we explained what we were doing. He understood and asked who the files belonged to and it turned out the offender was one of his direct reports. I believe the offender wasn't in work the following day or any other day subsequently.

Our initial tactic after finding a few of these users utilising the shared storage for their own onanistic purposes was to rename the folders "Please Delete" and a Text file put in them named "HR will be informed if not removed from company owned storage" but this one guy was a victim of the worst timing.

Not quite as exciting as finding a CEO's stash of heroin hidden on top of a removable ceiling tile, but that's another story!

Scanning an Exchange server for a virus that spreads via email? What could go wrong?

Re: Deleted Emails

"In the end the only inconvenience to the deleted users was that they had to set new passwords for themselves when they came back a month later"

I'm assuming this would have been prior to exchange 2000 as otherwise you would have had to create a custom x500 address for each of those new accounts to get round the issue of the new LegacyExchangeDN issue.

A restore would have always been the more sensible option in every way possible!

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

An incompetence of managers

An obstruction of change managers

A slopey shoulder of risk managers

An exasperation of process managers

A purposeless vanity of senior managers

A miss of directors

IP freely? What a wind-up! If only Trevor Baylis had patent protections inventors enjoy today

Re: Sorry, Trevor

Trevor never really represented the case properly. From what I remember it wasn't IP infringement. Trevor didn't many any money because they switched from using the springs to using batteries in the wind up radios and therefore weren't using his modifications as wind up radios had been around forever (if the historical documentary 'Allo 'Allo is anything to go by.)

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

IT Fights!

The fighting story reminds me of working for a leading organization in the information industry run by the BBC's favorite tech boss and namesake of every Nazi's favorite composer.

The aforementioned boss and his macho bully boy senior sales team would go our of their way to start punch ups in and around bars near the Leicester Square HQ of the company. The only thing I wished was that I was on the other side and could have punched Danny boy's lights out myself (a view held by almost everyone who has ever worked for him I think!)

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

I think everywhere I've worked has had some sort of Aircon related disaster...

In my first job is was an outlet on a south facing wall. The outlet was in direct sunlight and one Friday evening apparently it got too hot and the system completely shut down. There was no remote monitoring and the first we noticed was on Monday morning coming in to do early morning checks and the server room was too hot for anyone to enter. Mostly because of the portaloo sized AS400 in there (which fortunately stayed up as no one knew where the 8" floppy was which was required to boot the bastard thing) The only casualties were a couple of Compaq towers.

Then there was the stockbrokers I worked for who's domain controllers were desktops sitting running from a 4way sitting under a drippy aircon unit...

Not to mention the major university I worked for which did a failover test of the datacenter (or as management dubbed it "The Computer Room") aircon which failed because some engineer or other had disabled the failover system during previous testing... Suffice to say there were a lot of people on site that weekend...

As for my current employer, our datacenter turned into a swimming pool when the building's chiller pipes sprung a leak. Fortunately in this case everything survived because of decent void space below the units. It could have been so much worse as the DC was is in a completely watertight subbasement and there could have been millions of liters of water!

Re: injuries....

The computer gods always demand a blood sacrifice now and again. My knuckles and fingers are covered in small scars from building and repairing old Compaq and Dell servers.

Don't touch that mail! London uni fears '0-day' used to cram network with ransomware

Re: I'm not shocked!

Client mattered when it came to integrating other services and maintaining support. Which led to headaches in other projects (hello archiving and stubbing of mails..) Not to mention the people complaining when Eudora wasn't formatting mails correctly or kept crashing, like it was my problem they were still using a buggy client 2 years after support and development stopped (answer to which was, "they are academics, of course it was my problem!") Not to mention the inconsistent handling of attachments, especially the way that macmail dealt with inline attachments at the time...) I'm just glad I no longer have to touch clients with a bargepole :)

I'm not shocked!

I spent far too many years of my life working the email at London's top engineering and science uni... One of the biggest problems was that we could put all the security we wanted, but academic's are the very definition of special snowflakes. We could not dictate to them which clients they used (we had fellows who refused to upgrade from pine to alpine and this was 4 or 5 years after the final release of pine....) We also had the ridiculous situation where every system had to have a corresponding MX record because academics liked to run to their own mail servers (which we had 0% control over)

I'm more shocked that this hasn't happened more frequently.

Facebook turns billion-dollar profit into tax refund

There are even worse situations than this. When Google bought Motorola Mobility they effectively bought over $6,000,000,000 in tax write offs up until 2019 becuase of losses made my motorola and prior research.

What this effectively means is that because of it's already tricksy tax schemes the US government is probably going to be giving rebates to Google for years! Genius!

Google stealthily coalesces UK music cloud into being

Been using it a while as noted by using the US vpn connection to activate in the US. It did spend 4 days uploading all my music, but that was over 1000 albums so I expected that, works great, I just wish I could get a decent data allowance from o2 since they forced me to lose my unlimited downloads as I worked out that with my usual listening habits I'd need up to 3gb a month, which surely can't be that unreasonable in this day and age, whereas I get stuck with a 750mb cap which is quite frankly bobbins.

Ultimate bacon sarnie scrap starts to sizzle

Large flowery baps, whack in a large portion of well done meat and then squirt Daddies Sauce all over it.

Perfect

Google Drive stalls on LAUNCH DAY

Re: What's the rush?

It is a tested service though as it just appears to be a rebranded Google Docs with extra storage.

Paris - as the main article comes across like a selfish celubtard "it's all about ME ME ME ME!"

Titanic director James Cameron prepares for deep sea dive

Re: Units, please!

Elephants per head of a pin?

Samsung pledges Galaxy Nexus audio glitch fix

Not just during calls

I've noticed a few times with mine since getting it the volume graphics pop up and drop to silent whilst doing things and then hanging on the screen for 5 or more seconds. Although TBH it's what you get for getting a bleeding edge phone, it's always going to be a rocky road.

Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

"You know, I've always wondered why no bricks and mortar shops have changed to embrace a physical shop to sell digital products;"

The reason they haven't is Apple. I worked for a company a few years ago building kiosk solutions for burning mix CDs and albums in store, we had the major labels and most of the big Indies on board, we knew the CD solution wasn't a long term solution and also had a product to deliver digital to devices through a kiosk ready and waiting for deployment. 40,000 albums worth at the time in a simple, relatively cheap solution.

All the mp3 player manufacturers were on board and working with us apart from one. Apple refused point blank to deal with us, and for that reason the product was dead from the start. Apple don't want point of sale, they want Itunes and the control it gives.

Groupon IPO seeks $11.4bn valuation

They should go down the lastminute route

Get stupid valuation

IPO

Pay initial investors and founders obscene money

Take cash remaining and buy profitable companies

Laugh all the way to the bank.

Apple signs Xserve death warrant

Brings back my good old days

For some reason this reminds me of a company i used to work for who decided that the Apple Pippin would make a great product to use for processing (don't ask I still don't get it) and had a couple of server cabs full of them on shelves. Clearly apple have memories of this and want this model for the mac mini too.

Man takes old iPhone box, builds film camera

impressive

he made a 35mm camera using medium format film!