Posts by nick turner 29 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2008
When I worked at the Bank of England 4 years ago their fax service was still considered part of the critical national infrastructure. We still ran a fax server and had well in excess of 200 accounts on there some of which were in use daily. We tried to move to a cloud based solution whilst i was there, but because of it's status we had to keep it in house on a creaking server with myriad incoming lines!
Reminds me of my first job in the late 90's. Whilst working as a junior tech support I was given the task of sorting out a server that was running out of space due to file storage.
Looking at the folder lists I started working down from the biggest to the smallest.
Copious porn downloads were found. I decided to rename these folder things like Please delete, we know what you are doing.
At one point an extra spicy video was playing whilst a senior manager walked in the office, after explaining I was doing a clearout and had to check some of the files we realised it was uploaded by one of his direct reports, he immediately went off to have a quiet word.
Worst thing we found was a stash of very illegal videos which belonged to a senior network admin, that had to get reported to management and immediately be deleted (not kids though, that would have been reported to police) unfortunately i left shortly afterwards and never found out what happened to him, I suspect termination and coverup though.
US visa control is the absolute worst!
Many years ago I worked for a startup as their primary technical guy (building servers to burn mix CDs in physical shops just before MP3s really took off.
We were working with Loblaws in Canada and Best Buy in the US with exclusive deals.
Our main datacentre was in Toronto and myself and a UK and US colleague were sent over there to build servers from parts. We were sent for an unspecified amount of time without return tickets which turned out to be 3 weeks. Just before leaving there was a problem reported from the Best Buy HQ about their test servers so I got shipped to Minnesota to fix.
Was probably a day or twos work, but we had no idea what the issue was.
I got collared whilst trying to enter the US and pulled into a meeting with immigration. I had everything I needed, including a letter from Best Buy, a letter from my company, hotel details, etc. What I didn't have was a return date!
I had to prove that the 2 laptops I was carrying worked, I had to show them the data I was transporting on 3 external drives and then I had to argue with them for a couple of hours as to why I had to do the work and no-one from the US could carry out the work. That was the major sticking point even though that due to the proprietary nature of the setup I was the only person in the world qualified to work on the issue and that the CEO of best buy had requested that I personally came to fix things. They finally let me in and it took about 1 hour to fix the issue and then I had to return (albeit via toronto again and I has to spend an overnight stay in the deserted airport which was quite spooky!
I spent nearly 9 years working for a UK government associated institution with lots of IT stuff going on.
My main function was to keep anything Email related secure and running and regularly had meetings with the technical owners of other systems (and these were supposed to be technical experts...) I remember one meeting with someone who was supposed to be the expert on the system who had no idea what an IP address was and having to talk them through firing up a cmd prompt and running Ipconfig /all to help us diagnose the issues.
We also had an email engineer working on the team where I joined who had worked for a major UK bank for over 5 years running their email who had no idea how to read an SMTP header. Suffice to say, she ended up lasting 18 months after I joined when it turned out she was just incapable of learning anything beyond step by step guides for system admins.
I think it's a modern workforce issue though, having been working now for nearly 30 years I come from a generation who grew up in an era where everything was not handed to you on a plate and a broad knowledge of multiply technologies was needed to get things working and younger generations just expect things to work out of the box seamlessly.
My first ever role was as desktop support back in the dying days of the 90's and part of my role involved supporting the token ring network. We would get regular multi day network outages caused by someone tapping a cable with their foot under the desk and I learned the importance of a long handled screwdriver to try to listen to the patch panel to isolate the clacking switches whilst someone wandered desk to desk reseating the gigantic connectors!
Not a story from me, but my favourite networking SNAFU was (again the 90's) an ex worked for one of the UK's premier ISP/Hosting companies who ordered a large number of servers from a big box company (was probably Compaq at the time) and upon installation none of them worked. Upon further examination and a bit of fettling it was discovered that every single network card had been set up with the same MAC address.....
The data strategy at the Bank is a total mess. They have been trying for about a decade to consolidate and provide a shared framework for accessing the data. However so far they have run 2 projects for this, both with huge scope, multi million pound budgets. Both projects pumped the money into external consultants and both projects ultimately didn't achieve anything!
Back in my days of doing more general support I was working for a boutique stock brokers. They decided to start doing 24/7 trading and informed me I would be supporting them. I pointed out I was the only member of IT support staff at the time and contractually I would not be working outside of my proscribed hours.
On the first day of trading I was phoned at 2am in the morning and was rudely awoken by a trader shouting at me because email was not working. My immediate response was simply to saw "Fuck off and don't call back, I will deal with it in working hours, which will now start at 10am as I was fast asleep" and hung up.
The next morning I was called into the owners office with my IT director and was given a verbal warning for being rude. I pointed out that I was not on the company clock, I was called in a personal capacity on my personal phone and that was a personal response to being woken up, if they wanted 24/7 support they would need to hire at least 2 more support staff and negotiate a new contract with me.
Unsurprisingly within 6 months I was offered a significant amount of money to leave quietly.
That place really was the wild west though, a memorable highlight was our developer throwing a ceramic bowl at our 60+ year old DBA and charging him with a butter knife threatening to kill him which resulted in my director and I rugby tackling him and sitting on him until he calmed down and was escorted off the premises.
We had similar issues at my first support job nearly 30 years ago. It turned out the network blips were caused by the pigeons who roosted up on the building room and their takeoff and landing paths were in the direct line of the optical link.
I've worked at a few places with interesting cross building connections. My favourite being the offices on an Oxford street side road where the connectivity was achieved via using a toy bow and arrow firing a string across the road via top floor windows and a CAT5 cable strung between the buildings, I still have no idea how we got away with that, but it ran happy for a few years before the company owner was caught committing fraud and the company was wound up.
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!
"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!
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.)
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!)
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!
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
