Posts by The other JJ

Who, Me? Techie sent to fix Nobel Prize winner’s PC almost set it on fire

Re: "found no reason to suspect it was broken"

Or he's in witness protection.

Drop into conversation that there were some ugly geezers round earlier asking if you'd seen an Evri van today.

Casio decides it's about time the simple digital watch got a little smarter

But can it run Doom?

Duo who sold car crash victims' data must repay £118k

Re: Offence

Funny how they will be forced to pay, but when the directors of the companies making the cold calls get massive fines they simply walk away, put the company into liquidation and start a new company the following day.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Re: Screen shot, then hide the desktop icons

Talking of plugging in different mice, it was hard to beat the old trick of plugging the mouse into the PC on the opposite desk and vice-versa, especially if those users tended to lunch or go to meetings together and would return at the same time.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

Followed by power cycling the machine and really losing all their (usually unsaved) work.

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: I actually ran a switchboard

There's a special circle of Dante's hell for "Tell me, in a few words, how we can help you today".

I wonder whether they listen to the responses as they'd be educational (as well as expanding their vocabulary).

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Related issues

I stopped doing fixes for mates for much the same reason, after the time one collared me in the pub with "JJ, we've got a problem with the computer. You know you stopped it making a noise last week" (the PSU fan was clogged with dust and cat hair) "well since then my wife hasn't been able to download her email, and it was obviously something you did as it started after you fixed the noise"

UK.gov accused of Grinching Christmas by ignoring phone theft scourge

Re: Someone, somewhere lied to us

Then they get stripped down and sold for spare parts, here or abroad.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

You've never experienced RSX-11M-Plus SYSGEN with customised drivers then?

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Sodding salesmen

Years ago I worked at an engineering firm where there receptionist wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. It was the advent of fax and head office had one installed in reception (probably next to the telex machine) so the various divisions could exchange documents. After a week or so said receptionist asked me if all the machines were the same, and anyone could see documents as they arrived. I confirmed that they were and told here that if she needed to send anything confidential she should put it in an envelope and put that through.

A few days later I was summoned to a meeting without coffee in HR, where they attempted to give me a serious bollocking for taking advantage, but failed because they couldn't help laughing throughout it.

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

Don't be silly. Everyone knows that you don't go out and buy virtual memory but you download it.

Colt gets greenlight for £2.5bn London datacenter splurge

Re: "West London"

No, the one in Southall is a completely separate development, just 1km away and again claiming to have independent power arrangements. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7ev27yn7o

UK Home Office opens wallet for £60M automated number plate project

Loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing.

Wearing a loud shirt in a built up area during the hours of darkness.

Possession of an offensive wife.

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

Amazon tried that with their 'dash button' but consumers baulked at paying about a tenner per product for a button to order something at an unknown price.

Maybe Alexa could do it? "It looks like you're trying to squeeze the last toothpaste out of that tube. Would you like me to order a new one?" Er...?

Two Scattered Spider teens charged over attack on London’s transport network

Re: This is getting all too common

For those outside the UK or too young to remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04clpd7h0b0

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: My NTP-AD default...

For shits and giggles, run your DCs as Hyper-V guests with host time sync enabled, and join your Hyper-V hosts to the domain.

Funs fine. Until it doesn't. And then you have the problem of logging into machines that can't communicate with their DC because their clocks have been chasing each other all over the shop.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

In 1984 half a megabyte of (third party, compatible) RAM for a PDP-11/23 was £1,700, or about £8,000 today.

And yes, my hair is not longer grey but white, or silver as I prefer to think of it.

Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S

Would be a lifesaver for some users

About ten years ago at a firm where I was the BOFH we had a user who would come to IT literally screaming if the network hiccupped in the afternoon because she'd lost her day's work. We learned that when she sat down to work in the morning she'd start a new document for something like a major tender or proposal, work all day, and only when she was wrapping up to go home would she save it. (She probably wouldn't have bothered at that point had we not frequently rebooted overnight for updates.) When people (not just IT) pointed out that this was asking for trouble she countered that she didn't want to give it a name until it was complete.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Never let builders or even electricians install a network. At best give them the cable and tell them explicitly where to run it. I've twice been called in to diagnose the network in a new build (one office, one residential) where the electricians thought it was like telephones and daisy-chained one Cat5 around every socket.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Bin there and suffered

A few years ago a work colleague announced that the problem with her home internet was the wireless router and asked whether we could recommend one, but in trying to sound cool around the techies she pronounced it 'rowter'.

She returned from lunch to find on her desk a Screwfix catalogue open at the section of cordless power tools.

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: Passwords, missiles

That would make for a great plot element in a heist movie, where the robbers get away in three mini Coopers in a congested Italian city where the traffic has been brought to a standstill by taking over the traffic light computer with a hacked tape. What's that? It's been done?

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: As i read the passage

A hollow voice says "plugh".

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

I have a BOFH t-shirt somewhere which says on the back "YOUR computer's broken and it's MY problem?"

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Life was so much easier when you just typed B DK0: at the console, or even entered the bootloader on the switches and toggled RUN.

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

Re: Innocent party

I have RSX-11M-Plus handling dates >2000 perfectly fine here (on a PiDP-1).

RT-11, not so much.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

Similarly the name _vti keeps cropping up in SharePoint

In a similar vein, hardened SharePoint admins and power users may encounter the restriction that the string _vti can't be used places like folder names, and it becomes apparent that this is because it's used internally by SharePoint for unique internal folder names. But why _vti?

VTI stands for Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, founded in 1994 to create development tools for that newfangled world wide web, which including FrontPage and Personal Web Server. Sold to Microsoft just two years later those products evolved radically many times indirectly resulting in SharePoint. So a decision made thirty years ago, probably out of expedience and convenience is still embodied in a flagship product today and likely to remain so for a decade or more to come.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Clearing out my long term storage last year inevitably I'd come across stuff that looked interesting and, reminded by the mention of DEC RSX-11M up the thread, I found an RSX-11M-Plus administrators course, some thirty pages of it, not that I remembered going on it such course as I'd done my training at DEC Reading. As I read through nostalgia took hold and I was reminded what an excellent OS it had been. Only as I turned the final page did I find my own name as the course leader and author.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: We all learned the same way...: mv and move

ISTR from my brief exposure to them that IBM's AIX flavour of *nix for the RS/6000 had a few contradictory command line switches.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Re: Free Vending

Was the issue that the new machines required payment or that they invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea? I remember them from the 1970s/80s.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

I may have posted this before but back in the mid to late '80s we supplied a system to an office plant rental company, the sort that supplied and maintained potted plants to offices all over London. A 386 box running Xenix with about six serial terminals, it was installed late autumn when they said business was quietening down and had run fine through the winter until suddenly the customer complained that it was crashing a couple of times a day most days. Suspecting something to do with the usage increasing we took a look and did the usual sort of diagnostics but couldn't find a problem, and after a couple of weeks the problem went away. Some months later the problem started again so I went in to have another look. I wanted to speak to our contact who'd just gone out to their massive greenhouse, and as I joined him I heard a grinding sound and looked up to see the windows being opened by a system of rusty gears and motors. "Yeah, it's controlled by thermostats" he said, pre-empting my question. "...and it happens in spring and autumn but stays closed all winter and open all summer?" I hauled him back to the office and sure enough we were met by the users waiting for the system to reboot. One UPS later (that they'd said they wouldn't need when we originally quoted) and they were happy horticulturalists.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: do not read BofH when eating ffs :o)

> also +1 for Belgium, country about the size of Wales

Bonus there for using the correct 'El Reg unit of area.

Db2 is a story worth telling, even if IBM won't

Re: Byte Magazine

> though it also had Jerry Pournelle (and I remember someone even wrote a parody of his columns on Usenet, mocking his characteristic "style")

Was that the 'Terry Journelle' piece, that I think found its way into the April edition of a UK computer magazine. "Send me stuff and I might review it, I might not, but you probably won't get it back"

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

Re: Plot error alert

The VAX 780 incorporated a DEC RX01 or RX02 8" floppy drive and was shipped until at least 1984 and still in use well into the 1990s.

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Back in around 1988 a client had a PDP-11/44 system with IIRC several RM06 disk drives, similar to the one in the story. One evening they called me in to do an overnight reverse engineering of the ODS-1 disk format to try to retrieve data from a drive.

The backstory was that one of their PFYs, who already had a reputation as a bit of a cowboy, had swapped the packs for the evening backup, but tried to hurry and crossthreaded the pack leaving it at a slight angle, but the tension allowed the cover to unlock so he didn't notice. Apparently when MOUNT DUA0: was entered in the next room there was a sound like a gunshot as the heads, travelling at several hundred miles per hour, hit the edge of the platters full on. The remains of the heads were vacuumed from the drive bay.

It also transpired that the filesystem had grown too large for two disks but he'd not had the balls to tell the beancounters they needed more disks, so instead of the A -> B -> C rotation of two drive sets, he quietly swapped to an A -> B -> A rotation of three drives. And the drive he'd trashed was the current copy and its pair, newly formatted.

They told him not to come in the next day, or the one after that, or indeed, again.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

The downvotes essentially criticise the Hildebrand Glow meter as being a geek thing, but are we not geeks here? :-)

But seriously, I've gone this route myself and learned a few things about my electricity consumption that have saved a fair bit. But sure, it's not for the average consumer. And some don't want to learn, like a former IT Director who complains about his several hundred a month bill for using fan heaters as British Gas can't make his central heating work effectively, but doesn't accept that the cause is incompetence from BG that he needs to deal with.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Re: Plagiarism?

> Does the BOFH need a temporary work permit for the UK?

The BOFH works in the UK, for an oil or exploration company in Hammersmith, West London according to the pre-history, or his creator did IIRC.

But yes, rope and lampposts is the only way they'll understand.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

'The Song Remains the Same'

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: Why stop with a music track?

Or to quote Alice from the better days of Dilbert, "Was it metallic, noisy and flushable?"

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

Re: BOFH has been going on 25 years....

Over thirty if you count the 'Striped Irregular Bucket' stories first posted to Usenet in 1992 and which morphed into the BOFH a year or two later.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: There's a "Maidenhead Locator System" ???

Depends how old you are as it's been around since 1980. But it's mainly an amateur radio thing, often used in contests for targets like how many major squares you can make contact with in 24 hours. It's usually used with four or six character precision (about 100km and 10km respectively) but the standard goes to eight characters or about 1km.

So while nowhere near close enough for emergency use, it has the benefit like Lat/Long and the OS Grid of being monotonic, so comparing two locations it doesn't take much mental arithmetic to see which direction one is from the other, whether it's a long or short distance and whether you're getting closer or further. Unlike w3w.

Yours, from IO91ul...

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Re: Hmmm

"Once the rockets are up, Who cares where they come down? That's not my department..."

Oops! Sorry, wrong rocket scientist.

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

Re: "Ever done a little thing that made a big mess"

Similar thing a few years ago. Mid-morning, workstations were dropping off the network and a quick look showed them using 192.168.1.x which wasn't the workstation LAN range. Not having particularly intelligent switches at that time we could only isolate bits of the network and ask people to reboot to see what address they got while someone went searching for any rogue SSIDs. We finally traced it to a meeting room where we found a previous generation BT HomeHub hidden behind a cupboard and plugged into a network port. We recalled that the Sales Director was constantly bitching that his phone or laptop couldn't get internet in parts of the building, and he had previous form for plugging a cheap switch in behind his workstation to get a connection for his Mac, which we didn't allow on the LAN, and which slowed his machine to 100Mbps so a core application was timing out.

We took the offending device to the carpark, took turns at reducing it to scrap with a lump hammer and left the remains on his desk. Naturally he went apeshit until I pointed out that the company had lost some 200 man hours of work owning to his unauthorised network modification and I would be quite happy to discuss it with HR. He learned his lesson this time.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

You are at Y2

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

I went through one at LHR T4 just two weeks ago.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

I thought I was reading the BOFH...

...until the Ops Director and pet consultant weren't locked in the server room when the halon went off or trapped in the lift when it descended into a flooded basement.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

No mention of whether the i Vision Dee can express panic...

No mention of whether the i Vision Dee can express panic if you enter a virtual world while in motion.

Probably still negotiating the rights from the estate of Douglas Adams.

"The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They follow the principle "what you don't know can't hurt you" and turn completely black at the first sign of danger. This prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you. This does, however, mean that you see absolutely nothing, including where you're going."

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: Not only two signs...

Just before Covid I was working at a site where all the IT kit was in one of those freestanding air-conditioned rack cases. One day I noticed that a cleaner had spotted that the gap between the top of this rack and the ceiling was just the right size to store their bulk packs of toilet rolls. That was also the air outflow for the cabinet. With trepidation the head of IT and I opened the cabinet to be met by a blast of tropical air and a cacophony of warning bleeps. We were amazed nothing had shut down but he suspected the previous infrastructure manager had overridden the safety thresholds.

Re: Been there and saw it happen

One time a client's office had an electric lock fitted to their main door (from the shared stairwell) operated by RFID fobs. When they called everyone together to demonstrate it and hand out the fobs I asked if there was a key override. They said there was and the key was in the reception desk (inside). I suggested someone take that key home.

Next day as I arrived (fashionably late, as coders do) the office manager asked my why I had suggested taking the key, because nobody had been able to get in that morning until she arrived. I pointed out in the corner behind a coffee table the unplugged PSU for the lock and asked where they thought the cleaner would plug in her vacuum and whether she'd remember to plug the lock back in afterwards.

Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next

Re: Surely there's a design fault here

"surely the system should lock the user out completely after X number of rejections"

And the design fault with that is effectively denial of service. Some IT bod is working through the weekend on an upgrade, shipping are working through to clear a backlog or the chief beancounter is down to the wire for filing tax on Sunday night, and now they're locked out with no IT support available to fix the problem until Monday. Not every business has or can afford 247 IT support.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Re: Fahrenheit -- banish

Don't forget meters which I've even seen sneaking into BOFH articles, a story set in England and written by a Kiwi.

And I'm sure you meant AmericaniSe. :-)